Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) is a former American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States for 22 years from 1979 to 2001. As of 2012, he is serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Hanssen was arrested on 18 February 2001 at Foxstone Park near his home in Vienna, Virginia, and was charged with selling American secrets to Russia for more than US$1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 22-year period. On 6 July 2001, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of espionage in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He was then sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His activities have been described by the U.S. Department of Justice's Commission for the Review of FBI Security Programs as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history."

Hanssen was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a family of mixed Danish-Polish and German descent. His father, a Chicago police officer, was emotionally abusive to Hanssen during his childhood. Hanssen lived in the Norwood Park community in Chicago. For unknown reasons, Howard Hanssen arranged for his son to fail a driver's test. In later life, Robert Hanssen speculated that his father had done this in order to 'toughen him up'. The elder Hanssen constantly disparaged his son and said that Robert would never make anything of his life.

Robert Christian Hansen (born on February 15, 1939) is an American serial killer. Between 1980 and 1983, Hansen murdered between 17 and 21 women near Anchorage, Alaska.

Hansen was born in Estherville, Iowa to Christian and Edna Hansen. Throughout childhood and adolescence, Hansen was described as being quiet and a loner, and had a dysfunctional relationship with his domineering father. He was frequently bullied at school for his perpetual acne and his severe stutter. In 1957, Hansen enlisted in the United States Army Reserve and served for one year before being discharged. He later worked as an assistant drill instructor at a police academy in Pocahontas, Iowa. In Pocahontas, Hansen began a relationship with a late adolescent girl and married in the summer of 1960.

On December 7 of that year, he was arrested for burning down a Pocahontas County Board of Education school bus garage, for which he served 20 months of a three-year prison sentence. His wife filed for divorce against him while he was incarcerated. Over the next few years, he was jailed several times for petty theft. In 1967, he moved to Anchorage, Alaska with his second wife, whom he had married in 1963. In Anchorage, he was well liked by his neighbors and was famed as a local hunting champion. He even broke several records, documented in the Pope & Young's book of world hunting records. However, these records were nullified after Hansen's conviction^{[citation needed]}.

Eric Michael O'Neill (born March 3, 1973) is a former American FBI operative. He worked as an Investigative Specialist with the Special Surveillance Group (SSG) and played a major role in the arrest and life imprisonment conviction of FBI agent Robert Hanssen for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia.

O'Neill graduated from Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. in 1991 and earned a B.A., with honors, in political science and psychology from Auburn University in 1995, where he was a brother of Theta Xi fraternity.

O'Neill was assigned to work as Hanssen's assistant: his true role, kept secret from Hanssen, was part of the effort to learn as much as possible about which secret information Hanssen had revealed, and to ensure his successful capture and prosecution. Ultimately, investigators made a dramatic move to obtain a "smoking gun". While others briefly disrupted Hanssen's routine and confidence, maneuvering him into relaxing his rigid control of his Palm Pilot, O'Neill, under intense time pressure, secretly had its encrypted contents copied and returned it apparently undetected, despite forgetting which pocket of Hanssen's briefcase he had taken it from. O'Neill has speculated that, had Hanssen detected the disturbance of his device, he would have realized that all his hope of continued freedom was lost and that Hanssen might have shot O'Neill dead on the spot.

Tim Weiner (*1957) is a New York Times reporter, author of three books and co-author of a fourth, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. He is a graduate of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and has worked for the Times since 1993, as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan and as a national security correspondent in Washington, DC.

Weiner won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as an investigative reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, for his articles on the black budget spending at the Pentagon and the CIA. His book Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget is based on that newspaper series.

He won the National Book Award in Nonfiction for his 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

He is featured along with other foreign affairs experts in interviews in Denis Delestrac's 2010 "Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space". Enemies: A History of the FBI, Tim Weiner's latest book, traces the history of the FBI's secret intelligence operations, from the bureau's creation in the early 20th century through its ongoing fight in the current war on terrorism. He explains how Hoover's increasing concerns about communist threats against the United States led to the FBI's secret intelligence operations against anyone deemed "subversive."